Flame Of Diablo

He said flatly, ‘Es imposible. Where is your family, señorita? Who are your friends that they let you contemplate such madness?’

Rachel frowned. All sense of reality seemed to be slipping away from her, but that again could be attributed to the strangeness of the altitude. On the other hand it meant that she had to act the part she had set herself, and it was somehow easier to act than to believe in what she was doing. Deep down inside her she was afraid, but on the surface she was ice cool and in command of the situation.

She said, ‘It’s good of you to be so concerned, Señor, but quite unnecessary. I can look after myself. I’m neither a child nor a fool, and I don’t need you to judge my actions.’

Not a long speech, she thought detachedly, but an effective one, she hoped. In a situation like this, she needed to make every word count.

She glanced at the hotel-keeper, noting with satisfaction that he did not seem quite so sure of himself as he had been. There was an air of uncertainty about him, and he eyed her as if she was something new in his experience. She wanted to giggle, but that would be fatal, so she deepened her expression of calm assurance.

‘There must be someone around here,’ she said crisply.

‘Someone who knows this region well. And you don’t have to feel responsible for anything. Just introduce me to him, and I’ll do the rest.’

The man gave her a long look, then shrugged deeply and fatalistically.

He said slowly, ‘There is such a one—Vitas de Mendoza—but whether he will agree to take you to Diablo is another matter.’

‘That’s my problem,’ she said confidently, almost gaily. She had talked round this definitely hostile little man. She could talk round the world. ‘When can I meet him?’

He hesitated. ‘Later, señorita. I will speak to him of your request. At the moment he is engaged.’

She saw him give a half-glance over his shoulder at that door down the passage, and remembered the sound of men’s voices and laughter.

‘I’d prefer to see him right away. The matter is urgent. I’m not just a casual sightseer, I’m looking for my brother.’

‘And you think the brother has gone to Diablo.’ He shook his head. ‘That is not good, señorita, but it gives me an idea. Tomorrow or the next day there will be an army patrol arriving here. If you speak to Captain Lopez he will look for your brother.’

Rachel was silent for a moment. It was a tempting prospect to resign the responsibility for finding Mark to the army, but at the back of her mind she was remembering what Isabel had told her about the illegal trafficking in emeralds. Supposing when this Captain Lopez found Mark, he actually had emeralds in his possession? She swallowed. It didn’t really bear thinking about. She had no idea of the sort of sentences attempts to smuggle emeralds might carry, but she imagined they would be heavy, and that Colombian prisons would be a bad scene too. Besides, if Mark were arrested, it would be the death of her grandfather.

She had to face the fact that she must find Mark herself—with the help of Vitas de Mendoza, and hope that he was the sort of man who could be bribed to keep his mouth shut if Mark had broken the law in any way. The thought made her feel sick with fright and despair, but it also had to be faced.

‘I haven’t got time to wait for the army,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know yourself when they’ll be arriving, and they could be held up. I’ve got to see this Mendoza man immediately. There’ll be arrangements to make, and I want to leave as soon as possible.’

She left her small case standing by the desk and went down the passage towards the closed door. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d grabbed her arm and tried to stop her as she passed him. When she reached the door she risked a glance back over her shoulder, and saw that he was standing quite still staring after her with an almost bemused expression on his face, and she could have laughed out loud.

All she had to do now was bemuse Vitas de Mendoza into taking her to Diablo, she thought as she opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.

It was a good job that she was still acting—making an entrance—or what faced her when she entered the room might have thrown her, like an unexpected laugh at a serious moment in a play.

The air was so thick with cigar smoke that she could hardly see across the room for the first moment or two, and the acrid fumes caught at her throat. There were six of them altogether, all men sitting round a table covered in a green cloth. There were bottles and glasses, cards and a scatter of money, and she felt bitterness rise in her throat as she surveyed them. So this was the pressing engagement which the hotel-keeper did not want to disturb.

Her gaze flickered round the table. She could read amazement on their faces, and the beginnings of a lewd appreciation in some of their smiles. And on one face—contempt. Her eyes registered this and passed on, and almost in spite of herself, looked back as though she had not believed what she saw the first time.

He was younger than his companions—the mid-thirties at the very most—dark as they all were, with raven black hair springing back from a peak on his forehead. A thin face, as fierce and arrogant as a hawk’s, its harshness shockingly emphasised by the black patch he wore where his left eye should have been.

The man nearest the door pushed back his chair and stood up, smiling ingratiatingly at her. ‘Come in, chica. You want to take a hand with us?’ He spoke with a strong North America accent. The man next to him said something in Spanish, and a ribald roar of laughter went round the table.

But the man with the eye-patch didn’t join in the general amusement. Rachel found her eyes being drawn unwillingly back to him yet again. He was dressed from head to foot in black, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his muscular chest. He leaned back in his chair, one booted leg swinging carelessly over its low wooden arm, but it seemed to Rachel that he was about as relaxed as a curled spring, or a snake rearing back to strike.

Isabel’s voice sounded in her brain: ‘Bandidos and other evil men.’

The others seemed harmless enough—lecherous, perhaps, but harmless, but the man with the eye-patch was a very different proposition. She could believe that he was a bandit. She could see him in black velvet centuries before, a bloodstained sword in his hand as he cut down the defenceless Indians who stood between him and his dream of El Dorado. She could see him on the deck of some pirate ship, his face bleak and saturnine under that eye-patch as his ship’s cannon raked the forts at Cartagena and Maracaibo.

And she could see him on the other side of this table looking at her as if she was dirt.

‘Have a drink, chica.’ The man who had got to his feet was leering at her, pushing a tumbler into her hand. The spirit it contained smelled sharp and raw, and her nose wrinkled in distaste, but she smiled politely as she refused. After all, he might turn out to be this Vitas de Mendoza, and she didn’t want to offend him.

She smiled again, but this time there was a tinge of frost with it, setting them all at a distance. All except the man opposite, of course, who had already distanced himself, and him she would just have to ignore. She wondered what he was doing here. The others were obviously local businessmen enjoying the relaxation of a weekly card game. But who was he? A professional gambler, perhaps, if they had such things in Colombia. Certainly he seemed to have a larger pile of money lying in front of him than any of the others—ill-gotten gains, she thought, and caught at herself. This was ridiculous. She was standing here being fanciful and wasting precious time.

She said quietly but making sure her voice carried, ‘I’m here to see Vitas de Mendoza, and I’d like to speak to him privately.’

She waited for one of the bronzed perspiring men around the table to step forward and identify himself, but no one moved, and a cold sick feeling of apprehension began to swell and grow inside her.

She said, ‘He is here, isn’t he?’ and her voice shook a little because she knew already what the answer was, and she wished herself a million miles away.

The man nearest to her said quite jovially, ‘Would I not do instead, señorita? Dios, Vitas, you have all the luck—with the cards and with the women!’

She looked past him to the man with the eye-patch and saw his lips twist, as if this was one piece of luck he would have preferred to do without. He made no attempt to alter his languid pose, merely leaning back further in his chair and staring at her with a frank, almost sensual appraisal which she found offensive in the extreme.

That hotel-keeper, she thought furiously, must be off his head if he imagined she was going to go off into the wide blue yonder with a man who looked as if his career had spanned the gamut of crimes from armed robbery to rape!

Almost as if he could divine her thoughts, he smiled, a lingering, insolent smile displaying even, startlingly white teeth, and she realised with a sickening jolt that a man who could exude such a potent sexual attraction, apparently at will, would never need to resort to rape.

He stood up then, head and shoulders taller than any other man in the room, as she could see at a glance, lean and graceful like the jaguars who stalked in the undergrowth. A great silver buckle ornamenting the belt which was slung low on his hips, a silver medallion nestling among the dark hairs on his chest—they were the only touches of colour about him—and she remembered her joking resolution to come face to face with the devil himself if need be, and a little involuntary shiver ran through her.

His smile widened and she realised he had gauged her reaction and was amused by it. She forced herself to stand her ground as he approached unhurriedly round the table and came to stand in front of her.

‘I am Vitas de Mendoza, señorita. What do you want with me?’

She was sorely tempted to say it had all been a mistake and beat a hasty retreat. But at the same time, she knew this would accomplish nothing except to make her look a complete fool in front of these men, and that was the last thing she wanted. Her brain worked feverishly, and words rose to her lips.

‘I wish to buy your services, Señor.’

Which wasn’t in the least what she’d intended to say, and she saw the dark brows lift mockingly in response.

He said lazily, ‘You flatter me, of course, querida, but I regret that I am not for sale.’

One or two of his companions laughed, but it was uneasy laughter. Rachel noticed it almost without noticing it, because her face was burning with swift embarrassment at having been betrayed into saying something so ambiguous.

‘You don’t understand.’ In spite of her confusion, she lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. ‘I need a guide—a reliable one. You have been recommended.’ She was aware of it again—that intangible sense of unease in the room after she had spoken. She said, ‘You are a guide, aren’t you? The hotel-keeper said….’

‘You’ve been talking to Ramirez?’ He broke across her rather stumbling words. ‘Well, he’s right. I do know this region better than most men, and my advice to you is go back to Bogota and join one of the organised tours. This is no place for a woman.’

He turned away in dismissal.

‘No, wait.’ Almost before she knew what she was doing, she put out a hand and tugged at the sleeve of his shirt. He stopped and looked down at her hand, and there was a kind of hauteur in his expression. Her fingers looked very white and slender against the dark material, the nails smoothly rounded and painted with her usual pale pink polish. She relinquished the silky material hurriedly, the heat rising in her body as if she had inadvertently touched his skin.

She thought, ‘How dare he look like that! He may have a more educated accent than his friends, but he’s only a guide, after all. He’s for hire. He has to work for his living.’